


The Agile

by bonehandledknife (ladywinter)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: F/M, Gen, I should warn for Immortan Joe right?, Immortan Joe doing Joe things, the one where east asians can pass for 13 when they're 25, though not explicitly, where cheedo is slytherin, where everything is a metaphor, where it's shit asian parents say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 01:51:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4203423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladywinter/pseuds/bonehandledknife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cheedo is thirteen years old, or seven, depending on if you ask her. If you ask, then she would whisper ‘a little more than 2,500 days’ and someone will pat her head. </p><p>She had been five years old for a little over two years until she hit a growth spurt. </p><p>She tries eating less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Agile

When Cheedo was nine years old she was hungry, she was thirsty, and she was starving for shade.

When the three towers of rock rose up in front of her travel-stained family, it seemed a miracle, as did the water that streamed down it. It seemed wondrous, the luxurious green that grew at the tips.

“Aim that high,” her mother told her as her father left to fight for water. “Come with me.”

And they moved towards the lift. They watched from nearby, as day by day the lifts rose with one or two chosen to be part of the Citadel proper. They strained their ears to hear what was said, what was offered, what was discarded.

On the morning that the lift was scheduled to fall for the sixth time, her father uncorked the precious bottle that they saved. They dribbled the water on her hands until they shone pale, on her face until it shone clear, on her hair until it became again a brilliant black. 

“Beautiful,” her father declared.

Her mother pinched her cheeks and her lips until they glowed, eyes narrow, and told her, “I guess that’s the best we can do. Stand up straight. Don’t slouch.”

She hauled her towards the clank of chains as the machinery's lowered.

“Climb fast,” she told Cheedo, “Climb far, and remember to take care of us.”

Cheedo barely has time to nod before her mother's screaming,  _“She is full-life, unblemished!”_

And she is become weightless.

She looks up at the towers, at the green that is to become hers if she does this right. If she listens carefully and doesn’t mis-step. If she is obedient.

The largest masked man asks her, “How old are you?”

“Almost fifteen hundred days,” she says, holding up four slim fingers, voice small.

The masked ones laughs mockingly among themselves, “A smart one then!”

“I guess,” Cheedo admits, her heart pounding. Looking down gives her the view of the desert and the Wretched below. She does not want to fall.

—

Cheedo is thirteen years old, or seven, depending on if you ask her. If you ask, then she’d whisper _‘a little more than 2,500 days’_ and someone will pat her head.

She had been five years old for a little over two years until she hit a growth spurt. She tries eating less.

The girls in her creche who had eaten their fill had hit their blood sooner than her, a few even at ten. They disappear soon after and whispers are told of their successes or failures. Sometimes the guards speak casually of if one is a particular screamer. Sometimes they speak of when one or another is tossed back to the Wretched or hooked up onto a machine. This world is hard on stocky women.

So the greens are delicious, but she eats less, and throws up the mother’s milk. She fills herself on aqua-cola and the History women’s stories.

—

She has been around five thousand days old every day for over a thousand days when the Organic Mechanic looks up from between her legs and slimes at her, “Yer age?”

Cheedo stutters out a number that began with five and ends in vowels, and acid rubs the skin of her stomach together like pressed palms. Her shoulders creep in despite herself and she tells herself to be strong like in the stories but her spine won’t listen. She wants to protect her belly, it hurts. She wants to close her legs, but the Mechanic won’t let her. She wants her corner where she can remember the stories, but it won’t be given to her because—

“I think you’re ready for Immortan in any case.” He hauls her up by the upper-arm, “Lets go then. Yer blood should be starting soon, and y'might as well get used to bleeding in the Vault.”

( _The Vault is the highest place you can go,_  she reminds herself,  _this is what you’ve always wanted._ )

—

 _The thing about a lie_ , Cheedo thinks,  _is that you have to live it_. You have to become the lie and make it your truth, and let it decay your tongue.

She thinks this as she watches the Dag offer herself up in Cheedo’s stead. To protect her, because the Dag thought she was Fragile, and young.

The thing is, Cheedo might be older than the Dag.

She doesn’t remember any more.

—

Sometimes, when she looked around herself in  _this,_  the highest of the rooms in the Citadel, she thinks this is what her mother had wanted for her. There is more than enough to eat, and luxuries without measure: baths, and books, and actual beds. There is temperate, controlled air.

There is a _piano_.  ( _‘I’ve always wanted you to play an instrument.’_ )

Cheedo listens well to Miss Giddy’s words and Miss Giddy's sums, and knows that she has become accomplished, and learned.

But she thinks, as she stays still for Joe’s fingers, she’s become also owned.

( _'Obey them, and you will get far. You will get everything, riches, wealth. Just keep your head down. Do what they ask.’_ )

Joe hasn’t taken her yet, because he considers her too young. And perhaps she is. 

She doesn’t think she’d ever be old enough to be ready for him.

But it’s not for this reason that she agrees when Angharad tells them her plan. Dag’s eyes shine, fevered and hopeful, and her fingers knot into each other, shaking. She’s still bruised from when she’d stepped in for Cheedo.

Cheedo’s lies were for herself, because, at heart, she’s scared.

Cheedo’s agreement was for Dag.

—

The Vuvalini reminds her of her younger days, reminds her of a family who taught her to count in years instead of days, and of the joys of the horizon and of planning for it.

They are nothing like the Wretched. They are nothing like the grasping dirty piss-smelly hands she images scavenging at the base of the Citadel. Or.

Or. Perhaps they are exactly like them. Perhaps these Mothers are like the Wretched, or perhaps the Wretched are like these Mothers, and Cheedo had listened to too much of Joe’s ranting and spit. Had breathed in too much of Joe's cycled air. Perhaps Cheedo had thought her family was the exception.

Riding across the salt, Cheedo realizes that she had not thought of her family in maybe two thousand days. They are probably still down here. It's a bitter thought and makes her face burn. She looks around her at these not-Wretched and squirms around to the fact that she needs to do better. That they need her to be better, like Dag needed her to be better.

—

They are at the canyon. She sees that Furiosa is struggling and that Toast is pinned and that Max is too far away. They are returning to their Green Place and to the place that she _earned_ , that these women fought and paid for with blood and sacrifice and will. They’ve gotten this far through hope, and some guzzoline, through mercy, and some chains, through determination, and no few amount of anti-seeds.

But right now, she thinks, as she sheds the clothes of the Many Mothers, right now they need a lie.

She knows how to lie.

“ _Rictus!_ ” She screams, voice echoing, reaching towards him, “Take  _me_!”

—

She is able to haul Furiosa up because she’s stronger than she looks.

(Stronger even, than she believed herself to be.)

She is able to haul up the Wretched because she understands now. She was one of them. 

 _Is,_ one of them.

—

When Joe first looked at her he calls her the Fragile.

 _Close enough,_  Cheedo thinks.  _Close enough._


End file.
